Watch: Isil jihadists boast about buying Yazidi sex slaves

Young men filmed boasting about their hopes for "distribution day at the slave
market"

A new video has surfaced showing Isil jihadists joking about buying and selling Yazidi women as sex slaves, refocusing attention on the thousands of women and girls who have been kidnapped in Iraq.

The video shows young men relaxing and chatting about their captive women. “Today is slave market day,” says one man, at the beginning of the video. “Today is distribution day, God willing.”

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadists seized thousands of Yazidis when they swept through the remote communities where the minority lives in northern Iraq in August.

Men were lined up by the side of the road by the hundred, shot dead, and bull-dozed into mass graves.

Families were forced to convert to Islam. In addition, thousands of women and girls were taken to detention camps in the cities of Mosul and Tal Afar, and have been gradually sold off as servants or concubines, according to relatives, speaking to The Telegraph, and human rights groups.

The video has the atmosphere of jokey college “fratboy” banter, but seems also to reflect some reality. One fighter mentions that he is prepared to pay “three notes” - believed to be 100-dollar notes - for a Yazidi girl, or swap his pistol. Another promises to outbid him with “five notes”.

The men tease a fighter who appears to be very young, perhaps still in his teens. “Can you handle one,” they ask, as he laughs.

Isil has used its English-language online magazine to set out a formal justification of its use of women as concubines, which would appear at first sight to contradict the strict rules it is placing on relations between the sexes in areas it controls. It has also posted videos of women being stoned to death for adultery.

It relies on an apparent reference in the Koran to slave women being exempt from the injunction on men not to commit adultery and keep sexual relations to their wife or wives. It explains that Yazidis can be enslaved as captives because they are not “people of the Book” - Muslims, Christians or Jews - nor are they apostates.

Once enslaved, they can be handed out as a “share” of war booty, and then sold on.

The men in the video, posted recently and subtitled in English by the Dubai-based television station Al-Aan, seem to have no qualms, though one or two assert that they are not going to take slaves for themselves.

“Where is my Yazidi girl,” says a man who seems to be the leader among them. “Everyone is free to do what he wants with his share.

“Whoever wants to sell, I can buy, my brothers. And if you want to give her as a gift, also I can take her.”